Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose

David H. J. Larmour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134447756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The prose writings of Vladimir Nabokov form one of the most intriguing oeuvres of the twentieth century. His novels, which include Despair, Lolita and Pale Fire, have been celebrated for their stylistic artistry, their formal complexity, and their unique treatment of themes of memory, exile, loss, and desire.
This collection of essays offers readings of several novels as well as discussions of Nabokov's exchange of views about literature with Edmund Wilson, and his place in the 1960s and contemporary popular culture.
The volume brings together a diverse group of Nabokovian readers, of widely divergent scholarly backgrounds, interests, and approaches. Together they shift the focus from the manipulative games of author and text to the restless and sometimes resistant reader, and suggest new ways of enjoying these endlessly fascinating texts.

Part I

THE ARTIST AND IDEOLOGY

1
THE NABOKOV–WILSON DEBATE

Art versus social and moral responsibility

Galya Diment

It is well known that Wilson did not like Lolita, of which he informed Nabokov in his characteristically blunt fashion: “I like [Lolita] less than anything else of yours I have read” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 288–289). Nabokov was quite at a loss to explain why Wilson did not care for the novel, which he himself thought was his best and artistically purest creation. To change Wilson’s mind, Nabokov, who would later state with so much firmness that “Lolita has no moral in tow” (Nabokov 1966a, 286), even assured Wilson, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that “Lolita . . . is a highly moral affair and does not portray American kulaks” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 298). What Nabokov was alluding to in this comment was his and Wilson’s long-standing disagreement on the nature of art, and as to whether “good” art and social and moral issues were at all compatible.

Edmund Wilson has not fared well in Nabokov criticism, which tends to be rather partisan on the issue of the two men’s differences. It is a commonplace in Nabokov scholarship, for example, to assume that Wilson envied Nabokov his success and his talent, and that his envy somehow poisoned his reaction to Nabokov and his works. This view is very prominent in Brian Boyd’s biography, and a recent book by Gene Barabtarlo strengthens it even further. “It seems quite likely,” writes Barabtarlo, “that an ulcerous trace of Wilson’s spite toward Nabokov became noticeable by the mid-forties, worsened over the years, and turned especially acute after Lolita . . . because [Wilson] thought that Nabokov succeeded commercially where he [himself] . . . had failed” (Barabtarlo 1993, 274).

Yet anyone who is familiar with Wilson’s journals and letters, as well as with other writers’ reminiscences about him, will find this interpretation of Wilson’s reaction to another writer quite out of character. Wilson could be cruelly blunt and overbearing but to his contemporaries he was much more known for celebrating other writers’ talents, rather than begrudging them their successes. Pritchett, who knew Wilson personally and who admired Nabokov as a writer, was one of many who was quite convinced that envy had nothing to do with Wilson’s evaluation of Lolita: “Some have thought that Wilson’s distaste for Lolita sprang from his envy of the success of Nabokov’s book, but Wilson was the least envious, most generous of men, as generous as the forthright Dr. Johnson, more particularly the Johnson of Lives of the Poets” (in Groth 1989, 183). Wilson’s reaction to Lolita was probably more “territorial” than anything else. He appears to have been irked by Nabokov’s assumption that he knew things American to the same extent that Nabokov was often irked by Wilson’s assumption that he knew things Russian.

“It is difficult to imagine a close friendship between two people with such different political and aesthetic views,” John Kopper writes about Wilson and Nabokov in the recent Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (Alexandrov 1995, 57). Nabokov himself characterized his relationship with Wilson to Andrew Field as one where there was “hardly a moment when the tension between two highly dissimilar minds, attitudes and educations is slackened” (Boyd 1991, 494). And yet, throughout the 1940s, their relationship was relatively uncomplicated. For Edmund Wilson, Nabokov represented the culture and literature which had always fascinated him. For Vladimir Nabokov, Wilson, an accomplished man of letters, served as a gateway to American culture and the literary establishment. Their early letters to each other were full of appreciation and even tenderness. “Dear Vladimir: How are you?” read a typical letter from 1942, “I’ve been reading more Pushkin with great enthusiasm, and wish you were around to talk to” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 67). “Dear Edmund,” Nabokov would write after a visit to Massachusetts to see Wilson and his wife at the time, Mary McCarthy. “Those 24 hours were lovely. We shall be very disappointed . . . if we do not see you on Sunday” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 61).

And then something went terribly wrong, and seemingly irreconcilable differences, rather than appreciation or mutual tolerance, took over. There are various ways to account for these differences, of course. There are issues of personal temperaments involved, and those of professional inclinations. As one Wilson scholar pointed out recently, Nabokov was, after all, “quintessentially an artist and Wilson . . . quintessentially a critic” (Groth 1989, 199), and artists and critics often view things differently. Yet, it seems to me, it was precisely what had attracted them to each other in the first place that would split them apart later on, for it was Nabokov’s ultimate Russianness and Wilson’s ultimate Americanness that may best account for most of their disagreements.

As Rosalind Baker Wilson puts it, her father always had an unmistakable longing for “a very American frame of reference” (1989, 223). While he envied Europe its culture and its writers, he, unlike other American-born writers such as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, always believed in the American potential to develop an interesting cultural and literary scene of its own. He took personal and professional pride in the appearance of talented local writers, in particular his friend Scott Fitzgerald, whom he often tried to shape and guide. Thus he wanted Fitzgerald to get the best of what Europe could offer: “Learn French,” he admonished Fitzgerald in 1921, “and apply a little French leisure and measure to that restless and nervous system. It would be service to American letters: your novels would never be the same afterwards” (Wilson 1977, 64). “American letters” appeared to be what concerned Wilson most, for when, several years later, Fitzgerald decided to stay in Europe for a lengthy period of time, Wilson’s admonition changed to: “I . . . wish you didn’t insist upon living abroad, which I’m convinced is a great mistake for American writers, hard as America can be to live in” (Wilson 1977, 202).

Wilson as an author, critic, and journalist is also “quintessentially American.” In an article appropriately entitled “The American Edmund Wilson,” Robert Alter aptly captures Wilson’s intellectual hunger: “He was . . . the least bored of modern intellectuals, constantly finding new materials to read and new scenes to explore that powerfully engaged his attention, excited him to further inquiry” (Alter 1984, 171). Wilson’s is the hunger and the restlessness of the New Intellectual World, it is the burning and driving desire to uncover, rediscover, and reinvent what the Old World, the world most familiar to Nabokov, may have known for ages, and may have got tired of. In his political development, Wilson was equally “American,” and that, too, set him very much apart from Nabokov. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Wilson contemplated Marxism in the 1930s and, for a while, was even duped into believing that the Soviet model of development contained some hope for mankind. By the time he met Nabokov, in 1940, both his Marxism and his very brief love affair with Soviet Russia were largely behind him, but to the end of his days he, unlike someone like Dos Passos or Steinbeck, remained a staunch liberal. Throughout his life, he protested inequalities in the position of American Indians and blacks, and he also publicly condemned the Vietnam War.

On many of those issues, Nabokov often appeared to be on the opposite side. He was understandably anti-Communist and anti-Marxist, but in the early 1950s, in the midst of the worst “purges” of the liberal intelligentsia, Nabokov’s colleagues at Cornell were quite astonished by the seemingly callous and dangerous remarks he made about some people’s allegedly “pro-Soviet” inclinations. During the Vietnam War, Nabokov left no doubt that he had nothing but contempt for the protesters. Thus when he translated The Waltz Invention into English in 1966, he wrote in the Foreword that he would not have even attempted to write the play “lest any part of me, even my shadow, even one shoulder of my shadow, might seem thereby to join in those ‘peace’ demonstrations conducted by old knaves and young fools, the only result of which is to give the necessary peace of mind to ruthless schemers in Tomsk or Atomsk” (Nabokov 1966b, 4). Needless to say, some of those “old knaves” were Wilson’s friends, several of whom frequently marched and were at times arrested. What is interesting in Nabokov’s statement – beyond its obvious anti-peacenik rhetoric – is his allusion to “Atomsk” and “Tomsk.” Unlike Wilson, with his “very American frame of reference” which translated into his concern over what the war was doing to the American society, its youth, and its morale, the émigré Nabokov’s frame of reference obviously omits the United States and focusses on the hateful regime he left back in Russia, and the benefits that regime can draw from the anti-war demonstrations in this country.

Given these stark differences between the two men, it should obviously not come as a surprise that Wilson and Nabokov disagreed, among other things, on the role that moral and social concerns should play in art in general, and in literature in particular. What should come as a surprise, however, is that, upon close inspection, the debate was not – or should not have been – as extreme as it often sounds or is being portrayed. For, while Nabokov’s views on art were definitely absolutist, Wilson’s were not.

It was not an accident, therefore, that when Richard Rorty wanted to find a perfect antithesis to Nabokov’s views on art he settled on Orwell, rather than Wilson, who to many would have seemed a more natural choice. Orwell and Nabokov allowed Rorty to set up a perfect paradigm. On the one hand, there was the author of 1984 whose article “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda” was often used as a manifesto against the art-for-art’s-sake doctrine, and, on the other, there was Nabokov who liked to state, unequivocally, that “nothing bore[d him] more than political novels and the literature of social intent” (Nabokov 1973, 3).

Orwell’s and Nabokov’s statements contrast quite nicely. “You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from,” Orwell wrote in “The Frontiers,” “you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat.” Orwell also went on to state that the strongly politicized late 1930s and 1940s “did a great service to literary criticism, because it destroyed the illusion of pure aestheticism. . . . It debunked art for art’s sake” (Rorty 1989, 145). Vladimir Nabokov, who was quite active during the period Orwell is describing, obviously did not share that view. The example of Nabokov’s approach that Rorty gives is quite telling. Rorty draws on Nabokov’s lecture on Bleak House where he analyzes the narrative lamentation which follows the death of the boy Jo: “Dead, your majesty! Dead my lords and gentlemen! . . . And dying around us every day” (Nabokov 1980, 94). “This,” says Rorty, “is a call to public action if anything in Dickens is. But Nabokov tells us that the chapter is ‘a lesson in style, not in participative emotion’.” “Notice,” Rorty continues, “that if Nabokov had said ‘as well as’ instead of ‘not,’ nobody would have disagreed. By saying ‘not’ he maintains his stance as someone who is concerned with nothing but ‘aesthetic bliss’.” “Both Nabokov and Orwell,” concludes Rorty, “unfortunately got enmeshed in attempts to excommunicate people with talents and interests different from their own” (Rorty 1989, 145–147).

Wilson’s attitude toward the art versus moral and social responsibility question fitted in between Nabokov’s and Orwell’s. He did believe in a social mission for intellectuals and artists. “We are under a certain obligation not to let this sick society down,” he wrote to Louise Bogan, a poet, in 1931. “We have to take life – society and human relations – more or less as we find them – and there is no doubt that they leave much to be desired. The only thing that we can really make is our work. And deliberate work of the mind, imagination, and hand . . . in the long run remakes the world” (Wilson 1977, 206). But Wilson also habitually upheld one’s absolute right to be a “pure artist” if the artist’s talents and inclinations directed him or her that way. Wilson was, after all, an early popularizer of sophisticated literary perfectionists like Joyce and Proust, and he always appreciated them precisely for what they were, not for what they were not. While he may not have been particularly strong as a critic when it came to close artistic analyses (in which Nabokov was often superb), Wilson’s sense of literature as a constantly evolving whole may actually have been more acute and more comprehensive than Nabokov’s. We should remember, for example, that Wilson was among the first literary scholars not only to link Modernism to Romanticism, through the Subjective Impulse, but also to separate the two because, according to Wilson, unlike Romanticism, Modernism, thrived on “ugly” as well as “beautiful” and on “profane” as well as “sacred.”

Nabokov and Wilson’s numerous debates on the appropriateness of moral and social issues for art are well known. Faced with Nabokov’s outright rejection of anything that was not, in Nabokov’s mind, “pure” literature, Wilson often lost his cool and could sound more extreme than he actually was. “I have never been able to understand,” wrote an exasperated Wilson to Nabokov in 1948, “how you manage, on the one hand, to study butterflies from the point of view of their habitat and, on the other, to pretend that it is possible to write about human beings and leave out of account all questions of society and environment. I have come to the conclusion that you simply took over in your youth the . . . Art for Art’s sake slogan and have never thought it out” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 211). Nabokov was equally adamant in his response: “I do not give a hoot whether a writer is writing about China or Egypt, or either of the two Georgias – what interests me is his book” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 212).

The publication of Nabokov’s own uncharacteristically “political” novel, Bend Sinister, presented an apparent paradox in their ongoing debate. Contrary to what one may expect of a critic who was overall not bored by “political novels and the literature of social intent,” Wilson was actually displeased with the novel. “You aren’t good at this kind of subject which involves questions of politics and social change,” he wrote to Nabokov in 1947, “because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them. . . . Now don’t tell me that the real artist has nothing to do with the issues of politics. An artist may not take politics seriously but if he deals with such matters at all he ought to know what it is all about” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 182–183). Wilson expressed similar objections about Nabokov’s “political” play, The Waltz Invention.

Nabokov critics often dismiss Wilson’s reaction – as well as his subsequent refusal to review the novel – as a pre-Lolita case of envy. It is impossible to say how Nabokov himself interpreted it privately, but publicly he attributed Wilson’s low estimate of Bend Sinister to his friend’s dogmatism: “In historical and political matters you are partisan of a certain interpretation which you regard as absolute . . .” (Nabokov and Wilson 1980, 185). And yet Wilson was neither envious nor dogmatic. He was simply stating his life-long held belief – and he was stating it with his typical bluntness – that different writers have different strengths, and they should avoid the risk of being undercut by something they were not good at.

Wilson may have liked writers like Anatole France or Malraux, whom Nabokov could not stand, but it did not mean that he wanted everyone to write “political novels.” On the contrary, with Scott Fitzgerald – as with Nabokov later – Wilson definitely felt that his friend could be a better writer if he left political and social concerns alone, because he was not good at expressing them. “It would all be better if you would tighten up your artistic consciousness and pay a little more attention to form,” Wilson wrote to Fitzgerald in 1919. He also told him to learn from Joyce because of his “rigorous form . . . and polished style” (1977, 46).

Since Nabokov critics like to present Wilson as someone belonging primarily to the “social intent” camp, the fact that Wilson often fought against the extremes of this doctrine is largely overlooked. But in 1950 Wilson vigorously attacked The Saturday Review of Literature precisely because it published an editorial which called for “The Destruction of Art for Art’s Sake,” the editorial’s actual title. Wilson condemned The Saturday Review’s view as ignorant, simplistic, and extremely irresponsible for a journal devoted to literature (1977, 484). And even in the intense heat of Wilson’s argument with Nabokov over Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, the critic took some time off criticizing Nabokov to criticize those who

comb . . . literature for masked symbols and significant images [representing] ideas, philosophical, theological and political, which can never have entered the author’s head [while] show[ing] remarkably little sensitivity to the texture and rhythm of writing, to the skill in manipulating language, for the rendering of varied effects.

(Wilson 1972, 228)

Wilson himself did sometimes sin on the side of placing too much emphasis on liter...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION COLLUSION AND COLLISION
• PART I: THE ARTIST AND IDEOLOGY
• PART II: DISCOURSES OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY
• PART III: LOLITA
• PART IV: CULTURAL CONTACTS
• WORKS CITED